I would really appreciate some advice from a website developer.

I am about to start studying the basics of ALL facets to setting up commercial websites.
I need to choose which modules to start studying at college
I am keen to learn:

XML
PHP/mySQL
Javascript

I understand these are all key elements of a good website but in which order might one study the topics?

Also, is it easy to learn any of these outside the classroom.. i.e. by reading or online?

any advice on how to approach this matter would be highly appreciated.

Tim

I'm assuming you already have a good grasp on HTML. If you don't already know CSS (e.g. Style Sheets) then I would suggest you learn that next.

After that I would suggest JavaScript for creating client-side actions - form validation is a great example of JavaScript. Then move on to PHP. PHP and javaScript are very, very similar. There is some syntatical difference, but not much. The main difference is that PHP is "run" on the server and the output is then delivered to the user. The source of the PHP cannot be viewed by the user. Once you have a good understanding of PHP you can then work on implementing a database with it (MySQL being the most popular).

I don't have much experience with XML, but from what I have seen it is mostly used for transferring data sets from one platform to another. So, it wouldn't make sense to start on this until you are using a database.

Michael J